{"id":866,"date":"2018-11-19T20:17:30","date_gmt":"2018-11-19T20:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/?p=866"},"modified":"2018-11-19T20:19:20","modified_gmt":"2018-11-19T20:19:20","slug":"rewiring-news-exposure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/2018\/11\/19\/rewiring-news-exposure\/","title":{"rendered":"Rewiring News Exposure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For my rewire experiment, I decided to implement a simple\nchange and see just how much my daily information intake changes based on that.\nI began by thinking about the ways I\u2019m exposed to news, and realized that I don\u2019t\nreally have a consistent way to stay connected to global events. For\ninternational news, I rely on stories popping up as I scroll through different\nmedia like Reddit and Facebook. For news about my home country and the Middle East,\nI am even more limited in my exposure as my main go-to platforms do not cover this\npart of the world, so I rely on my social media circles and again, exposure\nthrough random scrolling. While the pages I choose to follow and the circles I\nchoose to keep have not failed to keep me up to date on significant events, it\u2019s\nbecome apparent to me that there are some flaws in using this approach. First,\nI am not as connected to Jordanian news as I\u2019d like to be. Second, my exposure\nto \u201cinternational news\u201d has devolved into an oversaturation of Trump. Third, the\nnature of these platforms make it easy for me to skim through the latest global\nevents in favor of seeing the latest in NYUAD confessions or r\/aww. While it\u2019s\ntrue that both Facebook and Reddit allow me to cater my experience towards my\ninterests, with reddit dedicating a whole subreddit to world news, they\u2019re still\nextremely distracting platforms that are easily susceptible to echo-chambering,\ngood for entertainment with light news exposure rather than the other way\naround. I decided to find an unbiased source of international news to replace Reddit\nand Facebook for whenever I feel like scrolling through something, and found\nthis chart on Quora:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Choosing to unquestionably trust the chart for the purposes of this experiment, I chose Reuters. (I also wanted to try the Al-Ghad app for Jordanian\/Arab news, but it never loaded).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scrolling through Reuters was\ndefinitely a more focused and informative way to get my news, and it seemed\nlike a step up in international news coverage when compared to others. A large\npercentage of the articles are still focused on the US and UK, but I also\nencountered news about Yemen, Syria, Saudi, Germany, China, and more within a day.\nI learned about some of the international response to Khashoggi\u2019s murder, the latest\noccurences regarding Houthis in Yemen and opposition to ISIS in Syria, and news\non corporations like Careem and Nissan. When I briefly opened Reddit to\ncompare, I noticed two political posts, one about a US congresswoman and the\nother about mass arrests in the UK. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Replacing Reddit\/social media with Reuters definitely made me aware of more relevant world events, but it was also a \u2018dry\u2019 experience. On the one hand, I can just get the facts and go on with my day, but on the other hand, I miss out on the user interaction that the other less-serious platforms make available, which can provide everything from further analysis and different viewpoints to memes relevant to the news article in question. Additionally, while Reuters covered a variety of businesses and countries, a lot of it still seemed to cater to US interests rather than a digital cosmopolitan\u2019s. All in all, this experiment paved the way for me to continue looking for a method of obtaining news that I\u2019m satisfied with, whether that involves social media, news media, or a mix of both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my rewire experiment, I decided to implement a simple change and see just how much my daily information intake changes based on that. I began by thinking about the ways I\u2019m exposed to news, and realized that I don\u2019t really have a consistent way to stay connected to global events. For international news, I …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=866"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":870,"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866\/revisions\/870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commtech.nyuad.im\/homework\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}